Bill Perkins
played tenor sax with Woody Herman and Stan Kenton. Doug
Ramsey, in the essay on Zoot Sims which appears in his
book JAZZ MATTERS, describes Bill as being one of a
group of tenor saxophonists "whose early professional
experience came in big bands and who idolized Lester
Young. They melded Parker’s complex harmonic discoveries
with Young’s sound (light, dry, sunny) and rhythm
(powerful currents of swing beneath a laconic surface)".
Chet Baker recognized Bill’s talent early on.

In the 40’s
Bill was in college in Santa Barbara and his parents also
lived there. Bill met Chet when Chet and Jack Sheldon came
to Santa Barbara to play a gig in a hotel. During this
visit they played together. Bill was struck by their age
difference. "Chet was about 16 years old then. I was 7
years older than Chet but he sat in and amazed us." Bill
has not had an opportunity to see "LET’S GET LOST",
but he’s been told the jam session at Santa Barbara is
mentioned in the movie. (I reviewed my tape and Jack
Sheldon mentions they were in town to play a gig, but his
comments are about the party at Perk’s mother’s house).

In 1949 when
Bill came to Los Angeles to go professional, "Chet was
very nice to me." Though Chet was not widely known
nationally he was well accepted in L A musical circles.
Bill recalls that there were lots of sax players around;
therefore, when Chet would say, "Let Perk sit in", that
was a real complement. "I guess he like the way I played
and he really helped me get started."

Bill
describes Chet as a good-looking kid, living in the fast
lane who took time to help a fellow musician. Bill didn’t
see Chet again until 1983 in La Varienne, France. Chet
immediately recognized him, and they had a good visit.
Bill dud not see Chet during his troubled years, but he
will always remember a young, talented kid who gave a sax
player trying to break into the music business a helping
hand.

Betty
Little, Gastonia, NC

"CHET IS MY
JAZZ MAN" Gunther
Skiba, Nice France

says Tarass
Bojtschenko from Charkow, Ukraine, CIS. Following is a
slightly abbreviated translation of his letter to me. The
contents do not need an intro. I just thought that our
readers might enjoy this "now a reader" letter. Here goes:

Dear
Gunther,

Sorry I
haven’t written in so long. In my country, the Ukraine, we
are experiencing much that is new, as well as many old
difficulties and problems. Yes, now the Ukraine has it’s
independence and it’s sovereignty, but our life today is
not easy and not jolly.

I’ve now
received two issues of the Newsletter from the USA. Many
thanks for the beautiful information about Chet’s life and
work. It is very important and interesting to me.

I would like
to correspond with other Chet-fans in all parts of the
world. Please publish my address in the newsletter.

Now I will
tell you about "my" Chet. In 1970, in the home of a friend
here, I heard for the first time an LP with Chet. The LP
had many defects and skipped a lot, but I listened with
great interest and enthusiasm. Since then I’ve been
searching for Chet LPs for my collection, but I’ve had a
lot of trouble with this project. In the USSR we have no
records with Chet. During the 70’s, our firm (recording
company) Melodlen produced only a few LPs with Ella,
Louis, Basie, Ellington, Oscar Peterson, and not one LP
with Chet. I wrote many, many letters to western Europe
and the USA to jazz collectors and jazz fans, but I didn’t
get very far. At this moment I have only 4 Chet LPs in my
collection. All of these are good quality and I listen to
them with great interest and love. They came to me from
some collectors in West Germany, Switzerland and the USA.
I would love to have 30-40 Chet LPs. That is my dream.
Some of my friends have a few Chet LPs, so now I know
about 15-18 of his records.

Why do I
love Chet? I love his melancholic way of playing, these
intelligent improvisations, the technique, the
Chet-orientation to the blues, his beautiful, human
singing I especially love pieces in the blues style and
ballads. I also Love Chet’s bebop records.

Yes, Chet
has his sound and style. He is a big success in jazz
history. We don’t know many jazz trumpeters with their own
personal sounds - Louis Armstrong, Cootie Williams, Dizzy
Gillespie, Roy Eldridge (Little Jazz), Clifford Brown and
Chet Baker. Yes, Chet is a giant in jazz. He plays with
interesting sidemen. He has beautiful musical taste and he
produced a lot of music. Yes, Chet is "my" jazz man.

Paris - The longer
he is dead, the harder it is to avoid Chet Baker..He has three records on the charts, he was
elected to the Down Beat Hall of Fame, there are a
book and two movies about him.An excerpt from an unfinished autobiography
in the current SPIN, a rock magazine, is
titles “Rebel Without A Pause”, describing him as
“cool, tortured, beautiful and damned”.

He keeps
creeping into my petty pace.I fought writing about him, and when Bruce
Weber’s great documentary film “Let’s Get Lost”
opened and closed months ago in the States, I
thought I’d just keep quiet, but now the film is
about to open here (next month), and I saw it, and
it’s wonderful.

I’m beginning
to glimpse a flicker of a smile on Chet’s face out
there in junkie heaven, where I imagine he has
charmed himself through the gate.

It is a
childish smile - childish not childlike.He’s bragging:“I’m a bad boy”.I once saw it in a populated dressing room
after he opened a gram bag of smack and snorted it
in one fell swoop.No retiring behind a closed door, no lines,
no straw.If ever there was such a think as a fell
swoop, that was it.The remains of the nose candy were all over
his mustache, a quarter of it must have dropped on
the floor.He was like a kid with his hand in the
cookie jar with the whole family watching.

He was a
natural-born charmer who remained, in a strange
way, innocent to the end and who got away with, if
not murder, suicide for 57 years, fell swooping it
all over the place.The bad boy as much as the great artist is
the subject of “Let’s Get Lost” the movie, which
is one reason it’s successful.

“Let’s Get
Lost” received largely negative reviews back home.Critics mostly said it was in bad taste,
did not concentrate enough on his music and that
much of the footage was irrelevant.“A high-gloss fashion spread for la dolce
vita”, said The New York Times (if this is la
dolce vita, give me “The Damned”).Jazz and movie experts alike said that
Weber, a well-known fashion photographer (Calvin
Klein, Ralph Lauren) is too lightweight for his
complex subject.

The combination
is in fact brilliant.First, Weber is obviously touched by the
man’s music and a fashion photographer is just the
ticket for a subject who was once compared to
James Dean and touted as a future singing and
movie star before, let’s say, taking another
direction.Robert Wagner once played a character based
on him in a film, in which he serenaded Natalie
Wood.

This tale of
blown opportunity, physical decline, chemical
dependency and finally unappreciated genius is not
sad.
When Chet says:“Bruce, I’m 57 years old”, he implies he
knew exactly what he was doing, understood his
weakness as well as his strength.He managed to survive in his ways, extreme
as they were.This is somehow not a downer, though you
may walk out with moist eyes.

Chet was an
artful dodger, manipulative, he got what he
wanted.He would switch from one emotion to another
in a flash.The movie, in black and white, captured all
of that in full color.The title is a stroke of genius and even
the shaky form reflects the unevenness and
disorder of the hero’s life.The screenplay for “Bird” - if not the film
itself - accomplished something similar, jumping
around in time and space with visual equivalents
of the unexpected flick of an octave key and
abrupt modulation to the bridge of “Cherokee”.(“Round Midnight” was predictable, it
didn’t swing.)

When “Let’s Get
Lost” opens with a bunch of young people dancing
and giggling on the beach in Santa Monica, you
know it’s the right track.Chet drives a dodgem car, grins in the back
seat of an open convertible flanked by two
beautiful, friendly young women, leafs for no
apparent reason through a book of pinups.All of this footage has also been
criticized as being foolish, unnecessary,
sensational, anda fashion photographer running amok.

Many of Weber’s
off-camera questions were called unnecessary,
insensitive and naive.He asks Chet’s mother if her son was a
disappointment to her.After a poignant close-up hesitation, she
answers:“yes”.He couldn’t con her or did he?

Musically, Chet
rarely played beyond his ideas.His punctuation was poetic.He left you trying to assimilate what you
heard, and wanting more.Falling out of the hotel room window in
Amsterdam in May 1988 (before the movie was
released) was a logical, impeccably timed
resolution.On the contrary, the two-hour film abuses
its welcome by about 15 minutes.Ex-girl friends and wives talk too long and
Chet sings too much.His trumpet playing was more imaginative
(with the unmistakable soulful breath vibrato)
than his (dead-toned) singing.I always suspected he sang so often at
least in part to rest his dentured embouchure.And I suspect that Weber is pandering by
including so much of it.

No critics
discuss Chet’s place in history, few talking heads
in general, few contemporaries, recall the old
days - trumpeter Jack Sheldon, a Baker
sound-alike, is brief and very funny.(Sheldon asked Weber not to tell Chet how
much he was being paid for appearing in the film
so that our hero wouldn’t hit on him for a loan.)Chet’s idea of humor is a Harry James
impersonation - which he does very well - and then
you realized that had he been born a generation
earlier he would very likely have led a big band
and lived in Las Vegas (Betty Grable and all).His continuing relevance is handled
visually by the young people surrounding him
(singer Chris Isaak, a young Baker look-alike, for
example).His friend Rugh Young contradicts Chet’s
version of the story of how five black guys
knocked his teeth out in San Francisco in the
60’s.She implies it wouldn’t have taken five guys and he probably
provoked it anyway.When she mentions that he gave her a signed
paper with the rights to his story, Weber says he
has the same paper.She looks shocked and then smiles, not
really surprised:“I guess we have something in common”.

During the
80’s, at the height of his art, he spent most of
his time in Europe and Japan.(He barely placed on American polls and was
ignored by the public.)He was never too far from Amsterdam, where
a sympathetic doctor furnished him with a
prescription for methadone.His Dutch agent once estimated that Chet
was earning $200,000 a year at the end, most of
which went up his nose or into his arm.

Weber plays the
heroin down.The man was sick, though he was busted
often and spent more than a year in jail in Lucca,
where he learned to sing in Italian.The smack is in the background until Weber
tells Chet he realized how hard these past few
days must have been for him, since he ran out.But he has good news.They arranged to get methadone from the
Amsterdam doctor and everything will be all right
now.
Weber has been called innocent for assuming that
such a drug fan would not have scored to fill the
gap, or could have functioned at all without doing
so.
Trying hard to keep his eyelids up, Chet tells him
as much.The fact that Weber chose not to cut the
exchange took a certain amount of personal courage
and journalistic instinct.

It ends with an
excerpt from an Italian movie with Chet under a
tree singing to a girl in his arms.Around them, young couples dance, hug, kiss
and cavort in a forest and we are reminded of how
much lovemaking has been accompanied by Chet Baker
records.And how much love he is still creating.